


a halo of patience and a less sporadic pace

by elizajumel



Category: 18th Century CE RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 03:02:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7873669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajumel/pseuds/elizajumel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander smiles brilliantly. “You know,” he says, “that we’ll never be fully free of ghosts.”<br/>“Of course,” he says. “After all, we may live forever, and who knows how many we’ll accumulate then.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	a halo of patience and a less sporadic pace

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Religious Duty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178921) by [ghostburr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostburr/pseuds/ghostburr). 



They come home to a hole in the ceiling. Into the plaster ruins stretch the splintered arms of a fine maple Aaron had admired in the neighbor's yard just yesterday, shading his eyes to gaze up at its immense, stately branches, still flowering in early November. As they watch from the car, single leaves float down from the thinner limbs, forming a thick blanket on the front lawn. So much for celebratory drinks; the master bedroom, at least, was back at square one.

Alexander swears. “Swindled. I knew the contractor couldn't be trusted.”

“He came highly recommended by the Jeffersons,” Aaron says mildly.

Alexander, for once, says nothing; just thrusts him a sidelong glare with a sharp enough nib to pen twenty annihilatory pamphlets. He slams the car door shut.

“I was looking forward to the bedroom,” Aaron adds after a beat, mournful, as they walk up the driveway. “We had those new sheets.”

“Thousand thread count,” says Alexander, perking up. “You don't suppose they survived?”

As they approach the doorstep, a treacherous crack sounds in the distance. Alexander jumps. “Is that the house?”

Aaron touches the condensation misting on the other man's forehead, spotting his nicely pressed shirt. “Thunder, my dear.”

“The sheets,” Alexander says, fumbling with the rain-slicked surface of his phone. “We never got to sleep on them once, for—”

“He's not going to be awake, it's nearly one,” Aaron says, wrestling it away before he can dial.

“What do you propose we do, sleep in a slowly flooding house? Do you know what that kind of water damage will do to the infrastructure?”

“The neighbors, general, keep your voice down. Mustn’t make an unruly first impression.”

“Damn the neighbors,” Alexander mutters. “Who plants a tree that large out front? Ruins the aesthetics of the whole street.”

They sleep in the mostly unfurnished living room (worn IKEA sheepskin rug, phones charging in a corner, Alexander’s old armchair), in the sleeping bags Aaron conveniently unearths from one of a dozen boxes with their packing tape slit open and contents yet undisturbed. Alexander had purchased them for a camping trip the two had yet to get around to taking; Billy Clark’s series of Instagram posts, all mountaintop selfies and virtually identical sunsets from somewhere in the Canadian Rockies, had hit his partner with a dart of wanderlust. In the morning, Aaron, waking first, makes coffee in the new machine, the only thing unpacked in the kitchen besides the two mugs Alexander proudly brought everywhere: “Columbia Dad” (Philip) and Grumpy Cat (Angelica). It’s pristine and silver, yet unstained, and each sip tastes as fresh as the first. “Truly a modern marvel,” he says aloud.

The beans he shuffles into the top are imported; the Hamilton children had pooled their allowances to get Alexander a monthly subscription of varied artisanal coffees last Christmas. Aaron knows, though, how Alexander fears a change—more specifically, a loss—in energy levels with unfamiliar brands, and so sticks to his Dunkin Donuts Original Blend. (Except on special occasions: “Vacation coffee,” Alexander had said triumphantly, the first time he’d taken a sick day, as he prepared to work from home with pneumonia. “Time to try the Brazilian.”)

“Don’t use my mugs,” Alexander says, padding into the kitchen and swiping Grumpy Cat from the counter. “Knowing you, you’ll put a crack in one of them somehow, and I’ll have you know they’re of sentimental value.” He reaches into the nearest opened box and rummages around among the wrapped vessels, then tosses Aaron’s favorite mug to him—“Warning: 50 and Cranky” (Theo).

“I'm well aware, my dear,” Aaron says. “Though it seems my own possessions aren't entitled to the same care.”

“Coffee,” is the only grunted response. “Where are those absurd little sugar cubes of yours?”

“I threw them out when we were packing up the apartment. We can replenish the pantry later. The real estate agent mentioned there was a grocery store just five minutes down the road.”

Alexander throws him an irate, decaffeinated glare. “Did you throw out all the spices too? We could have used those, Aaron. Now we have to buy a whole new set. Cumin’s getting pricey these days.”

Aaron sets his mug down and wraps the other man in his arms as he digs around in the box labeled KITCHEN 1/3. “Maybe some fresh air, angel.”

The front lawn glitters; the grass hasn’t yet frosted over, each blade sharp and alive, dew and rain mixed on their surfaces and perfectly preserved like beads of green glass. It’s going to be an unusually warm winter, Aaron thinks, the air crisp and light, lacking the bone-chilling depth mornings often acquired in the city. He hopes Theo, up in New Haven, has pulled her fleece jacket out of storage. Having rained through the night and into the early morning hours, the sky is banded low across with the soft, blurred shades of a rainbow.

Alexander looks at it; though his features are relaxed, his eyes focus on the sky with their usual intensity, sharp as a microscope's gaze, scanning for the fullness, the unobjectionable proof of its beauty. Ignoring the gaping hole in their bedroom ceiling (which they have yet to examine in full), Aaron looks at him, head tilted back to soak up the sun like some strange exotic flower, copper hair overgrown and curling over his ears; unshaven, the vague line of a belly over the lip of his pajama pants, pillow creases ironed into his forehead. He says, “Marry me.”

Alexander spits coffee onto the newly painted porch. Aaron sees it in the crease of his brow, that his brain, ever compartmentalizing, has time to express annoyance at the stain it will leave on the rosewater white even as he processes Aaron's request. “Excuse me?” he says, what seems like a long time later.

“Marry me,” Aaron repeats dumbly, words falling into his head and tumbling out of his mouth like marbles. He feels giddy, building up steam as he adds, stilted, “We just moved into a house together, the children are all away at college or at Eliza’s most of the time. It's been three years, general,” he says, stepping closer, unwrapping Alexander’s frozen fingers from around the mug and placing it a safe distance away on the porch table. “Since our first…encounter,” he adds, grinning, and Alexander groans. “We're already committed, in sickness and in health, who else is going to nurse your migraines and my bellyaches? We might as well make it…legally binding, no?”

“You make it sound so impossibly appealing,” Alexander deadpans, but there’s an undercurrent of horror rising in his voice, a _You can’t be serious_ , as if Aaron’s just bought five vegetable spiralizers from a TV hotline or accidentally packed lube instead of anti-itch cream into William’s backpack before sending him off to the Schuylers’ (again).

“Don’t you want to wake up next to each other every morning?” Aaron says. “Share pajama sets? Swap newspapers? Though I suppose coffee mugs are still off-limits. But perhaps we’ll reach that point eventually.”

“We already do all those things,” Alexander says. “And I’d save the overly sentimental, Mr. Burr, the waking up next to each other and long walks on the beach. It’s not quite your style.”

“For the tax benefits, then,” he says desperately.

“Keep digging yourself deeper, colonel, I don't think you've reached the earth's core just yet.”

“For God’s sake, Alexander, if you’re going to say no then just say no already. Don’t put me through this agony,” Aaron says, placing a hand over his heart. Under his comically splayed fingers, he feels its frenetic sprinting.

“I…cannot continue this conversation with you in your bunny slippers,” Alexander says, appalled. “Inside. More coffee. Then we'll consider this—” Aaron sees him push back the instinctual word— “ _proposition_ of yours.”

 

They decide nothing, that day or the next. As they settle into the house—taking their sweet time with the hole in the ceiling, since Alexander keeps burning bridges with every contractor in his Rolodex—it becomes almost a part of their routine. Aaron wakes first, salutes the tarp covering the hole, shedding ghastly blue light over the otherwise tastefully furnished bedroom: taupe walls (Alexander having vetoed Aaron’s choice of a “positively Satanesque” warm cherry); cream sheets (new, a duplicate of the first); by the window, Aaron’s proud old fainting couch, salvaged with Theo from a yard sale, for which Alexander had professed initial loathing but upon which he now spent hours nightly stretched out, draped extravagantly in financial reports.

Along the remarkably well-insulated walls hung modish little black and silver frames, snapshots from the past five years of their lives. Theo, Angelica, and Philip at their high school graduation, grinning in matching caps and gowns; Philip’s cap with an iron-on Columbia crest patch and some tasteful well wishes, as on a cast for a broken limb, from the Adams boy; Angelica’s reading LATER NERDS in sparkling silver letters. Theo in the _Nutcracker_ , poised on toe in her Sugarplum costume. Coney Island last summer, William waving wildly at the camera with the hand not holding a stick cotton candy, Junior and James blank-faced and squinting in the sun. Most conspicuous, Aaron thinks, is what’s missing from the menagerie. Theo’s light smattering of summer freckles, the only feature she hadn’t inherited from her father (who burns like a lobster). The piercing black eyes of Elizabeth Junior, who has started going by Beth in her kindergarten, class, disconcerting on one so young. Aaron could have given her those eyes himself; strange, pseudoscientific fantasies stir his dreams, an alchemic child with Alexander’s flame-colored hair and his long thin nose, elfin ears.

Aaron starts the coffee in the mornings, then picks up the newspapers from the doorstep. Fifteen minutes or so later, Alexander follows, cursing as he trips faithfully over the sheepskin rug. “Coffee,” the voice croaks from the banister. Aaron already has two cups on the table, several papers spread out. Their Roomba hums happily along the floor, zipping up lint balls and crushed Cheerios. When he remembers to, he puts on Alexander’s favorite classical station.

Their speaker, whose name had come pre-programmed (much to Alexander’s chagrin), the result of an impulse Amazon purchase, vibrates to life when he says, “Alexa, put on Classical for the Soul.” Last week, the speaker (“Why does your robot have a gender?” Angelica had said, annoyed, the last time she came home for the holidays) saw fit to grace their morning routine with “Ride of the Valkyries,” which Alexander hadn’t been able to stop humming for hours and summarily added to their morning commute mix. “Makes me feel alive,” he’d said, defensive.

Alexander joins him at the table, bed-headed and waking up by degrees, scowls when he sees Aaron idly sucking on a sugar cube while perusing the _Times_. “You’re going to ruin your teeth like that.”

“Good morning,” says Aaron. “Your coffee’s ready. Marry me?”

It’s been a month or so. Here’s the paper, the new contractor is coming by tomorrow, don’t frighten this one away, and will you marry me? This time, Alexander can’t even muster up his usual patronizing smile. Aaron had heard him up until four the night before, typing furiously. Sometimes, when his partner is too fired up to bleed his heart all over an impersonal keyboard, Aaron wakes up with ink stains on his skin, frustrated scribbles of a pen nearly drained; once, even, half an editorial on the unreasonable allocation of federal funding for _fruit fly research_ , scrawled along the concaves of his back. “I slept like an oyster,” he said. “Didn't feel a thing.”

The minutes pass in companionable silence. Alexander, who had yesterday made a resolution to go gluten-free after reading an article Troup had sent to their group text, shoved a piece of toast in his mouth. “We're out of butter again,” he says.

“We have two whole sticks in the fridge,” Aaron says. “On the dairy shelf.”

“You mean those solid bricks of fat? They're repulsive,” Alexander responds thickly around a mouthful of bread, wrinkling his nose. “We need the spreadable kind, in a little round plastic carton. Low fat.”

“Fat is fat,” Aaron says airily, spreading his own slice with some of the hazelnut spread Theo had warned him to consume less of.

“You and your sweet tooth,” Alexander says, not entirely without affection, eyeing the jar. 

Aaron slides it over to him. “Well?”

Alexander lets out a world-weary sigh. “My kingdom for a peaceful breakfast.”

“You? You've never known a moment's peace.” Aaron grins at him, entirely affectionate, and is met, insides thrilling, with Alexander's own brilliant smile.

  

He suspects that, if more people knew who they were, his position might become like that of the romantic interest of an Olympic athlete or teeny bopper TV star: everyone circling, curious, resentful, wanting to know: what is it like to love and be loved by Alexander Hamilton? (The reverse may very well apply, though he finds himself hard-pressed to imagine as eager, as receptive an audience for Aaron Burr's lover.)

He might tell them: it’s not unlike restoring a house. There are things one finds immediately, easily beguiling; the graceful turn of a bannister, the vintage wallpaper faded from exposure, the floor of old polished cherry impossibly well preserved. (Things that call to mind words like timeless, predestined.) And there is the basement with its mysterious drips, the rust ring around the sink drain; some repairable, the result a previous owner’s neglect, others less so. And the fault lines upon which the house was built; its close proximity to a busy airfield, or its propensity to sink, inch by inch, into the yielding inevitable earth. The house is settling.

And you settle into the house, in all its winsome disarray, fixing and painting and re-insulating until the warmth trapped in the windows, the wildflowers peeking their heads out from the cracks in the driveway, start to feel like small gifts from a benevolent spirit tasked with keeping an eye on the place. (Until it starts to feel like a home, he half-thinks, but as Alexander would say, not his style.)

Alexa plays a folk station one afternoon, when Aaron is reading over one of Theo's philosophy papers and Alexander is, rarely enough, napping. _He presents her with the pictures and says, these are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you. These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you._

Aaron looks down at the tousled red head in his lap, up at the dancing motes of dust. The house is haunted, no doubt.

 

“Who was your first love?” Alexander asks, as he readjusts in the bed, taking more than half of the blanket, three-quarters of the pillow space. They’ve changed the sheets, warm as it’d gotten in early March. (More articles from Troup: “The Very Real Effects of Climate Change,” “How to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Right in Your Own Home!”)

Aaron has proposed forty-one times now, the occasions less frequent and more sporadic. He theorizes, it's like those rats who push a lever that produces food at random, as opposed to those that get a kernel per push. He doesn't think the logic entirely applies, but it amuses him to turn it over in his head: Alexander, slowly but surely, getting impatient, confused, baiting him with questions disguises as pillow talk: who was your first love? Who was your first time? Who was your best? Besides me, of course.

“We've talked about this,” he says.

“Not in any level of detail to satisfy me,” Alexander says, grinning toothily. “Come on, colonel. Where's that confessional attitude?” Absurdly, he starts humming “Son of a Preacher Man.”

“Theodosia, of course,” Aaron says, chest tightening with a rising sense of unease. It had been fifty years, in a sense, but it had also been six.

A hand on his, warm as always to the touch. “I apologize,” Alexander says. “We don't need to talk about this.”

“I just haven't,” Aaron starts, then realizes, with a little dismay, that it's more or less a complete and accurate sentence.

“Have you talked to Theo about it?”

“Not much, she knows I...” Aaron raked a hand through his hair. A fist in his chest, grabbing hold and twisting.

“It's a unique sort of pain, isn't it?” Alexander. “Living through the worst of it, twice.”

Aaron wonders what Alexander considers his worst to be. His mother, as far as they've figured, is still alive in this new world. Eliza never left him in the first. And he, Alexander, is alive, cantankerous and political yet fascinatingly, frustratingly likeable, blood thrumming beneath that odious scar still.

He shakes his head. “It was different this time, we really thought...there were all the new medicines, the treatments, you know, the doctors were confident for a while. We thought—”

“You could outperform fate,” Alexander says in _that_ voice, almost supercilious in its conviction, and Aaron hates him for a second.

“You believe in that?” is all he says.

Alexander frowns, shifts in the blankets. Aaron feels the press of a warm foot against his shin. “You know,” the other man finally says, “if you’d asked me that five years ago I would have said yes. Fate brought us back, gifted us with a second chance. But what kind of gift would it have been to simply relive all the same mistakes? Maybe in breaking from the pattern we’ve broken with fate…or perhaps that was what fate intended all along. This is a question for Augustine or Calvin,” he adds with a teasing note, kicking lightly the prodigal (Protestant) son’s knee under the covers, “not for me.”

“You were never one to shy away from definitive proclamations,” Aaron says.

“I’ll let that slide, because you are undoubtedly still woozy from the effects of my sexual prowess,” Alexander says. He shuffles up on his elbows and kisses Aaron, mouth soft and swollen from their activities of the last few hours. (Having an entire house to themselves, out of the city, generally empty of children, certainly had its perks.) Alexander is being atypical, evasive, _silly_. His heart thunders wildly, a runaway horse. He’s sure the other man can hear it.

“Sometimes it felt like falling into a sinkhole,” Aaron says. “Just waiting for the past to repeat itself.” Alexander shifts back onto his side, propped up on one elbow, looking at him intently now. “Sitting in that hospital. Theo on the floor, reading…something very advanced for her age. She always ignored those puzzles and coloring books the nurses offered her. I thought maybe she shouldn’t stay there with me all the time, that it wasn’t healthy, but—I grew up with death,” he says, realizations unspooling as he spoke. “My parents, my grandparents. My sister. Theodosia, the first time…Theo asked me once.”

He closes his eyes, exhaustion settling over him. “She asked me if Mama had died because of her, if she would have been alive if she had never been born. If we could have chosen differently this time. Would we have? My God. No child should have questions like that in their head.”

“She’s also lived two lifetimes, colonel,” Alexander says gently.

“If her forty-odd years count as two lifetimes, I must have lived an eternity by now.” Aaron opens his eyes, carefully avoids Alexander’s. The ceiling has been finally repaired, without a chip in sight, the crown molding flawlessly rounded and white. “Theodosia always said there was so much more to offer her now, everything she could have done in the first but wasn’t able to. College, a career. She would have been so proud…it would have been wrong not to bring her into this life, she’d say.” Secretly he’d wondered, though never would have said aloud, if that was what Elizabeth Hamilton had thought as she’d held each of her eight children, and given them the same names.

“I’m tired,” says Alexander, at the pinnacle of his highly uncharacteristic tact (Burr-like, really), and Aaron takes the lifeline with a grateful hand, leans into the hollow of his neck and tries to even out his breathing. His left hand traces down Alexander’s chest, his stomach. He studies the softening of the proud chin, the deep grooves around the eyes of one who both laughs and scowls easily. They are getting old, again.

 

“Try learning the Single Ladies dance,” says Morris. “That way, you fail, at least you get a viral video out of it.”

Jay snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous. That song is _so_ 2000 and late.”

“I already regret this,” Aaron says, and downs his glass.

“Come on, colonel,” Morris says, slapping him on the shoulder so hard it nearly comes back up. “Next you’ll be saying we can’t plan your bachelor party.”

“I really hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Aaron says, alarmed. “I’m not even looking for advice, really.”

“And your independent strategy is panning out so well,” says Jay, gesturing to the bartender for another round.

“Listen to him, Burr,” Morris says loudly. “He did, after all, bag the most beautiful Livingston sister. And I, well, my expertise extends—”

“What’d I miss?” Troup pulls up at their table, panting, and drops his briefcase on the floor with a thump. “Trial ran late. Aaron, why are you so pale? Are you sick?”

“He’s trying to propose to our dear Alexander,” says Morris. “Operative word being—”

“Oh!” Troup’s eyebrows flew into his hairline. “How lovely, Aaron. I must admit, I’m quite…pleasantly surprised that you would confide in us about something like this. 

“I didn’t, as a matter of fact. These two were clowning around on _my_ work computer—”

“And found a search for…what was it again, Aaron?” Morris booms.

“Ethically sourced diamonds,” Aaron says tonelessly.

Jay lets out a hoot, the sound of someone who’s laughed at the same joke too many times but can’t help himself every time he hears it again. “And somehow we saw through your clever guise of helping Theo out with a _research project_.”

“Do men’s rings have diamonds?” Troup asked.

“A tasteful little band across the middle is fairly customary,” Morris answers. “And we know our Hamilton would wear some nice ethically sourced diamonds beautifully.”

“Customary or not, it’s the twenty-first century, I’m proposing to my partner, who is another man, so customary is already out the window, and I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to throw my money behind companies that adhere to labor and environmental standards in the process,” Aaron says impatiently. “Now if you three don’t have anything helpful to add, I’m going home to rest before our early meeting tomorrow.”

The other men exchange looks. “You two are really rubbing off on each other,” says Morris. “Ha! Up top.”

  

“No proposal today?” asks Alexander, in the tone of a child who’d declared they didn’t want anything for Christmas this year, then sat and watched everyone else tear into their colorful bags and boxes while putzing around with last year’s Etch-A-Sketch.

“Maybe I’ve given up hope,” Aaron says, tossing him his pajamas. “Maybe I’m waiting for you to propose to me, now.”

Alexander freezes and misses the wad of silk, which lands on the carpet next to their bed. He bends to pick them up, and wordlessly changes. Aaron, leaning against the headboard, watches with interest: in summer, his lover’s skin browns beautifully, though his back and chest, so often hidden from the sun under crisp, carefully pressed layers, are somewhat paler and still visibly freckled. The belt is unbuckled, the pants shrugged off and tossed onto the fainting couch. Alexander’s thighs are pale too, still slim and toned like someone who rides horses often, with that tantalizing, amusingly bright dart of red hair between them. Aaron’s fingers twitch toward it. 

“Have you ever read that book,” Alexander says finally, after he’s undressed and dressed again, “about the five love languages?”

“Don’t believe I have.”

“Neither have I,” says Alexander, “but I’ve heard about it. The author posits that there are five emotional languages couples use to communicate and understand love.”

“Oh?” Aaron says, gears turning. It sounds like pillow talk.

“If I recall correctly, it’s something like…physical touch,” Alexander says, sliding into bed next to him as the little spoon, which Aaron takes as an invitation. “Acts of service,” his partner continues, breath hitching slightly. “Colonel…”

“Go on,” Aaron says, stroking the small of his back. “Service, you were saying.”

“You are incorrigible,” Alexander says, but stretches like a cat into the curve of his hand. “Service, such as…dropping off the kids. Picking up a prescription. The little things.”

“And the others?” Aaron asks, snaking his hand around the other man’s waist, lower.

“Gifts,” Alexander says hoarsely. “Quality time. Words of affirmation.”

Alexa is spilling music in the corner, an artist Angelica used to listen to while painting alone in her room: _drinking wine and thinking bliss is on the other side of this, I just need a compass and a willing accomplice_.

“Is there a reason you bring this up, my dear?” Aaron asks. He can feel Alexander getting harder, but he wants to hear the end of his thought before they engage further.

Alexander rolls away from his touch and turns around to face him. “Why do you keep asking me to marry you when you haven’t even told me that you love me more than once?” 

“—Hm?” Aaron says, blankly.

“There was the one time,” Alexander says, “when we came back from visiting your uncle, and he gave you hell, not even for being with me but for checking your phone during the service, we couldn’t even tell him that I was more than your _partner_ , and we came back to the apartment and made love and you were shaking afterwards, you told me that you loved me. I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.”

“I…general,” Aaron says, feeling desperate but not sure why. Alexander’s voice had held even, though his words came out in their usual quick, clipped pace, with his typically uncomfortable clarity of recall. “If these love languages are what’s…we’ve lived through a lot together but I can’t read your mind, you need to tell me if—”

“I just don’t know if I can do it. When the only time you said it was when you were clearly in an uncontrolled, emotionally vulnerable state.” For a second, Alexander sounds like the doctor he might have been, delivering a fatal prognosis. “When it still hurts you so much to talk about your wife.”

That fist again, his chest like a balloon that can only take so much pressure. He opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes. A strident defense rolls to the tip of his tongue, but he reigns it in. A plea—everyone leaves, not you too—but he reigns that in too. Anger— _why agree to move in when you can’t even communicate your needs to me, beyond your coffee orders and whining calls for me to clean up after all your damn papers_ —swallowed whole, like a pill. His stomach feels cold.

Alexander sighs, the sound obnoxious in the thick, static silence. “I’m not one of your impulse buys, colonel. I’m not a goddamn spiralizer.” He turns away again, leaving six careful inches between their bodies, and switches off the lamp. Aaron follows suit on his side. The darkness is deafening.

 

“And what about Laurens?”

“What about him?” Alexander says, but Aaron can see the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, like a cat stirred to alertness by an approaching foe. 

“Do you still speak?”

“Not much.”

“And Eliza?”

Alexander gives him a look to say he finds the question bizarre. “You’re there nearly every time I interact with her, colonel. Dropping off the kids and picking them up.” 

“Where do you feel you are with them?”

“You sound like a therapist,” Alexander says. “Is this necessary? I just want to read my newspaper.”

“Ha!” Aaron nearly shouts. “Who’s avoiding now?”

“I’m keeping up with the global news, you dolt. Don’t project.”

“Don’t _evade_.”

Alexander slams the paper down and points at him. “Like you’ve ever wanted details on John before.” 

“John,” Aaron repeats. It’s the first time he’s heard Alexander call him by his given name, and it peels away a layer. He can imagine what _John_ sounded like in Alexander’s mouth called across a field in the heat of battle, while they were making love. 

Alexander has clearly gone into defense mode; he’s practically cracking his knuckles. “When does the airing of grievances end?” he says, aiming for and just falling short of blasé.

“When our house is free of ghosts,” Aaron says.

 

They fuck under what used to be the hole in the ceiling, Aaron a rocky overhang against the angry, inexorable pounding of the ocean of Alexander’s anger. Sometimes. Other days he gives as good as he gets, Alexander’s pale skin purpling under his teeth, the press of his fingertips as into buttons, finding what makes him tick, what kind of pain gets him off. Which is to say any and all, but especially the harsh quick tug of a fistful of red hair, a hand curled around a throat, anything that hooks the air right out of him. Sometimes Aaron fancies he can still see the stars through the splintered slats, hear the disapproving murmurs of the gods. 

Aaron has interfaced with countless bodies, innumerable variations of face and voice and limb, and their component minds: witty, self-deprecating, calculating, faithless, enamored. Only two has he spent enough time with in bed to truly take apart (though finding the right gears quickly has always been one of his strong suits), and he takes pride in this, the ease with which he disassembles Alexander. How he likes to be kissed, how his body offers itself up like a gift, ready to be unwrapped from its silk bespoke layers, thin, gracious, giving, greedy. The spot on his jaw, the sensitive, pretty arch of his feet, that scar—Aaron carefully kissed around it, most days—and others, smaller, from more mundane accidents: a power cord left out carelessly to trip over, a scuffle with Junior’s ill-tempered guinea pig. Accidents that (not unlike that one, Aaron tells himself) place him and his body in time. Solid. Present. Here. His. 

“We very well might live forever,” says Alexander. Aaron imagines, _the Great_ , but doesn’t say. He’s not wrong; who knows how many incarnations may theoretically be in the works for them, how much they would retain from this one and the last, how many lives they would be forced to play out, how many times he would (perhaps in alternating turns) kill the one he loves or love the one he kills.

_Was he a gentleman?_

On that same lazy Sunday, they debate semantics. “No decorum, these modern politicians,” says Alexander, skimming headlines with distaste, and Aaron takes a drag of his cigar by the window, replies, “Yet a far cry from the reigns of Catilines.”

“You accuse yourself of conspiracy?”

“I prefer the word _intrigue_.” 

Alexander snorts on his way to refill the coffee pot. “Despicable,” he mutters.

Aaron smiles. 

 _Sir,_ I _met him_. And again, and again, and again.

 

“The bedsprings are hurting my back.”

“Well, I told you while we were there,” Aaron says without looking up from his case notes. “It’s immensely foolish to buy a bed without testing it first.”

Alexander snorts. “Like I was going to have sex with you in an IKEA.”

“Either way, general, it’s a shame that our nice sheets have to go on that miserable excuse for a mattress.” 

“A shopping trip,” Alexander says, perking up. “A new mattress. Or perhaps just one of those foam toppers.”

“Foam might leave me worse for the wear,” says Aaron. “I prefer a firmer surface.”

“My God,” says Alexander. “This is it. We’re not even married yet and we’ve become one of those elderly couples who needs to sleep on separate beds for their idiosyncratic back problems.”

Aaron swallows the _we could be_. It’s been months. “There are those new-fangled mattresses, general, where you can customize each half with your own preferences.”

“And during sex? I’m not going to engage with you on your rock of a half-mattress.” 

“I suppose we’ll have to find another place. The fainting couch, maybe.” 

“I shudder at the thought.” 

“Sleep on it,” Aaron says, and dodges the toss of Alexander’s pen.

Fall comes again and the first set of bedding is brought out again, fitted ceremoniously over the new foam topper and, under Aaron’s side, a slim plank of wood. (Troup and Theo had done some helpful Googling, and it was certainly cheaper than a custom-made mattress—Theo had let out an uncharacteristic cackle over the phone at the mere suggestion. Alexander approves too; “Soldierly,” he says as they tuck the corners under, and Aaron smiles.)

 

“Always beating me to the punch,” he says, when he walks in and sees Alexander kneeling on the floor with a box in his hands. 

Alexander smiles brilliantly. “You know,” he says, “that we’ll never be fully free of ghosts.”

“Of course,” he says. “After all, we may live forever, and who knows how many we’ll accumulate then.”

His lover’s smile, if possible, grows even wider. “I have a feeling,” he says, “that at least one will always be familiar. I think that should we grow old, and I want to grow old with you, and die to live another life, you’ll still be there with me. Obstinate. Incorrigible. Maybe we’ll get to start younger next time, though. College, perhaps.”

For a second Aaron, horribly, thinks he’s going to start crying. “More time that way,” he says. “Do you mind?”

“What, being the one to bite the bullet?” It’s a testimony to time that neither of them flinches at the expression. Alexander’s eyes, the energy of his whole body kneeling there on the floor is all beamed straight into his smile, and it makes him blindingly, unbearably beautiful. He wants to look away, but a voice that sounds suspiciously like Theodosia’s in the back of his head tells him _stupid, you’re going to want to remember all of this._ “No, colonel. It was my turn this time around.” 

A thought Aaron once had slips into his mind and leaves, quickly, through the back door. _Must it always end in one or the other?_

“You need to hurry up and say yes,” Alexander says. “My knees aren’t what they used to be.” 

“Yes, yes, now get up, you old warhorse, before you wear your joints out on the ground,” Aaron says, and they’ve reversed roles, Alexander droll and short-sentenced, Aaron biting, overcome, choking around the words. “Of course I’ll marry you, like I haven’t asked a thousand—”

And Alexander cuts him off with a kiss, tasting like coffee and ginger gum, and whispers in his ear, “The diamonds are conflict free,” and the sun streams in through the window, warms the wallpaper, the molding, the hand in his hand.

He’ll take it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pink's "Crystal Ball," lyrics in text from Laura Marling's "Ghosts."


End file.
